Game for Five (13 page)

“Ah, yes, the motive. I'm only telling you this because you'll find out tomorrow anyway. The lab was besieged by reporters. Can you imagine those dumb specialists missing an opportunity to blurt it all out?”

He paused for effect, took a questioning and satisfied sip of his cappuccino, elegantly wiped his mouth, and crossed his legs, as if to say: Now we can talk.

“The girl was pregnant, that you already knew. And you also knew who the baby's father was, didn't you? Piergiorgio Neri, right?”

Another artful pause, and one finger held up in a negative gesture.

“Wrong. The fetus and Neri aren't even distantly related. Plus you also have at your disposal the DNA of the other suspect, who might still be involved, you try it . . . ”

Incredulous looks from the members of the senate, who had understood immediately.

“ . . . and bingo! A perfect match, so perfect you'd think they were fake. They're identical, that's all you can say.”

Consternation.

“Bruno Messa?” Aldo said.

The doctor nodded gravely and finished his well-deserved cappuccino. “Precisely. And that makes things more complicated. Obviously, it's much harder now to link Alina and P.G. It also seems that this other fellow didn't tell the police everything he knew. It's natural to be distracted when you're making a statement, but some things you really should remember. Anyway, it wasn't so much that I was expecting the question of the baby to be decisive, but dammit, if they had asked me to bet on who the father was . . . ”

“Why, were you so sure of winning?”

The tone, the tone. It's always the tone you ask a question in that matters. The same question, asked in two different tones, can lead to an answer or a fight. In this case, the tone of Ampelio's question didn't indicate any genuine curiosity about what the doctor believed, it was more of heavy-handed reference to the victim's virtue, especially in the “chastity and moderation” department. Which was why it was only the doctor's politeness and the inappropriateness of hitting an octogenarian over the head with your chair that avoided a barroom brawl like something out of a Western.

Inevitably, though, the conversation stopped for a moment. One moment was enough for Tiziana to enter the discussion for the first time and ask, “So what now?”

Whether out of provocation or admiration, the doctor replied directly to Tiziana instead of to the chorus as he usually did.

“Now we're in the shit. There are two suspects. The first one definitely can't have committed the crime, and so he's released. The second one, who by the way is the culprit”–exaggerated nods from the old men, who were again trying to pose as a select audience–“spent a night that seems cut out expressly to incriminate him, but since we're in Italy and not among the Taliban, or in the United States, you can't condemn someone without evidence. And in this case there isn't a single shred of evidence. Not one. Moral: in a few months they'll release him and he'll be interviewed by the gossip magazines, sitting at a café table with some gorgeous but oh-so-understanding bimbo, sipping a Daiquiri and talking about how much he suffered in prison and how his life was devastated by the experience.”

*

The doctor turned, and drew the threads of his arguments together for the benefit of the pensioners.

“It's all over, you'll see. It isn't possible to establish a definite connection between Alina and P.G., not with all the thousands of people gravitating around them, who'll give seventy different versions between them. He'll be released with profuse apologies, they'll spend a few more months pretending to investigate and then file him away in the History drawer. Then one day, we'll be watching television and we'll catch a late night show where they talk about the Costa murder, reconstruct the events, and interview the people involved. And that's when we'll finally realize that it's over, that Alina's dead and we can't do anything about it, not even play detective because we'll have lost the urge.”

“I haven't lost the urge yet.” Massimo's voice, coming from behind the counter, was calm. No declarations, just an observation. “Forgetting about babies, what reason could P.G. have had to kill Alina?”

“I don't know, Massimo. I don't know.”

“Neither do I. But that doesn't mean I can't find out. You know, whenever they asked Newton how he could solve such complicated problems, he'd reply that it was easy, you just had to keep thinking about them. I'm no Newton, that's for sure . . . ”—a pause to pour himself some tea—“but if I don't understand something there's no way to get rid of it, I worry about it all day every day until I understand it.”

“And if you don't?”

“Oh, no need to worry. Sooner or later I think of a new problem and forget all about the old one.”

 

 

No, it's pointless. I give up. I don't understand a fucking thing.”
Comfortably seated at the wheel, with the seat, his white shirt and his back nicely stuck together by a full quart of sweat in spite of the open windows—the air conditioning having broken down a month earlier—Massimo was traveling along the highway toward Rosignano. He was going to the sea, the real sea, in the Maremma, not like in Pineta where the water's so murky you can't see your feet even when it's less than half an inch high, and nothing was going to make him lose his good mood. Plus, when he was in his car, he could talk to himself as much as he wanted and nobody gave him a dirty look—they probably just thought he was talking hands free on his cell phone.

Massimo often thought about how a car changed your personality radically. More specifically, he thought about it every time he flew off the handle at other motorists whose crime was to occupy the same road that was his by right even though they couldn't drive to save their lives. If the same people had cut in line while he was waiting his turn at the bakery, they would have gotten a shake of the head from him at most. But when you're in a car, you're in your shell, alone with yourself, so you can be completely honest and you aren't scared of possible social consequences, like nasty looks or punches. You can afford to lose your temper. The other people aren't people, they're actors on a mobile TV screen, strange goldfish that pass you by, some too fast to make out, others too slow to be allowed to drive legally, like that old man in the hat just in front of me, forty miles an hour on the highway, but you'll see, the day they make me transport minister, there's no way anyone over seventy will be allowed to drive.

“Anyway, let's recap. The stupid kid can't have killed anybody, at least not at the time she died, and that's a fact. He had time to make her pregnant, though, and that's also a fact. Whoever left the body in the trash can by the pine wood, if it's someone different than the murderer, is more than six feet tall. Fact. And that asshole overtaking me on my right is another fact. AC 002 NY. I hope you crash.”

Outside, the hills flowed by gently like waves of grass and earth, and Massimo sometimes distracted himself by looking at the landscape.

He switched on the car radio, just in time to catch the beginning of a song he liked a lot—
Walk Like an Egyptian
by the Bangles—and didn't think about anything while the song lasted. Then, when the music gave way to some crazy idiot with an overly friendly manner, he switched off the radio and started talking to himself again.

“Hypothesis. P.G. has some other motive we don't know about. Maybe he found out the girl was pregnant and thought it was his. But do you kill someone for that? I certainly hope not. I mean, you can't, not really. But then, why would a guy like P.G. kill someone? Why do people usually commit murder? Well, if we were in a book by Agatha Christie you'd kill for money, or because you thought your first wife was dead and so you remarried and then your first wife shows up and you have to get yourself out of the mess, so you shut her up in a room with a crocodile and it's all settled. In the Nero Wolfe books, on the other hand, it's always blackmailers being killed by their victims, fathers preventing their daughters from marrying, and so on. You always kill on the rebound, to obtain something. You don't kill someone because you hate him, you remove an obstacle. That's in books. But in real life, you almost always kill your mother-in-law because she's been breaking your balls for the past twenty years. So why would a real-life P.G. kill? Jealousy, no. I don't think he gives a fuck. Blackmail, maybe. But what could he have been blackmailed about that made him scared enough to kill? Drugs, maybe. You work in a big disco, you see lots of people. It's possible. In fact, it's quite likely. The girl probably knew something about the drugs, seeing that she went out with Messa who'd even sniff Totti's socks if they were chopped up fine enough. What the hell, I could care less. It's up to Fusco now, let him deal with it. I have to stop thinking about it or I'll go crazy. Right now I'll stop at a diner, have a good crap, and then keep going.”

Having spotted a diner, he switched on his indicator and was about to move into the lane when a black Porsche overtook him and slipped in front of him, blocking his way. Cursing, Massimo braked with a screech of tires.

When he entered the diner, his legs were still shaking.

 

Massimo was on his way back, tired and happy and with his skin puckered by the saltwater, an unpleasant memory of a pleasant bathe, when he started to think again about the murder. Compared with the morning, when his thoughts had been tangled and incoherent, now, late in the afternoon, each idea came to him slowly, let itself be examined from every angle, and joined his other ideas in the order that seemed right. The drug hypothesis, for example, made perfect sense. But if he had to be pernickety (and he had always been good at that), there was something else that made less and less sense. It was something the lawyer had said at dinner the previous night, and that kept coming back into his head. Which was that the girl had been killed around midnight. Yet, strangely, nobody had seen her in the hours preceding the crime, either at home for dinner—hardly surprising since she had actually phoned her mother to tell her she was going out to dinner—or after dinner. She hadn't gone anywhere where anyone knew her. Either she had been out of the house on her own for three or four hours, or else she had already been with her killer. In that case, P.G. came back into the picture. He hadn't gone to dinner at the Boccaccio as he usually did, and he'd gotten to the club late. Then everything started to make too much sense. There was too much overlap between the hours when there was no trace of P.G. and those in which nobody had seen Alina.

Listen, he told himself, let's go back to the bar, then we'll see. If anything new happens, you can bet the old folks' home will know it before anyone else.

 

Back at the bar, he was surprised to see Del Tacca and Grandpa Ampelio still sitting outside, while both inside and outside the usual groups of idle young people were starting to gather for the aperitif, something to keep them going until their unearned evening ration of food. At the same time, the doctor get down off his usual stool at the counter, came out, and greeted him by touching an imaginary hat.

“Where are you going for dinner?”

“Tonight, home. My wife doesn't want to go out. I may go out myself later. See you tomorrow.”

Yes, see you tomorrow. Before the murder, the doctor, like so many others, had been in the habit of dropping by the bar once a week. Now he seemed to find an excuse to come in every day for an aperitif or a coffee, and he'd always sit on the same stool, from whose summit, Massimo was sure, he could most easily admire Tiziana's breasts, and then he'd be off home or to his clinic.

Massimo took a chair, turned it back to front, and sat down at the table with the class of '29.

“Hello, everyone. What are you still doing here?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Hello, Massimo,” Del Tacca said. “Just chatting a bit. Rimediotti and Aldo are on their way.”

“Good, I was missing you all. No dinner?”

“No, the women have all gone to the priest's charity do, but I can only stand Don Graziano when he's asleep. If he can get to sleep, of course, with all he has on his conscience, the pig. We'll be eating something here soon.”

“If you bring it with you. I don't think there's much left over from the aperitif, and I've finished the flatbread.”

“I'd be happy with a little ice cream,” Ampelio said, casually eyeing a group of young sylphs who were gliding with ostentatious indifference along the sidewalk, displaying their marmoreal asses beneath their summer dresses.

How beautiful they are, these beauties coming back from the sea.

Weary from a long day in the sun, but still walking with the rhythm of Norse goddesses who are above the common herd. An aura of natural untouchability that confers on them an almost otherworldly appearance, a warning not to try to guess what dreams are hidden behind their dark glasses and beneath those summer dresses that both cling to their hips and flutter in the breeze. Goddesses from a remote Valhalla that may reveal itself to be some wretched nearby locality as soon as they open their mouths. Don't speak, girls, just let yourselves be looked at.

“Poor you, you'll have to do without. How many have you had today?”

“Do me a favor! With your mother breaking my balls every day about eating and cigarettes, and your grandmother always telling me not to eat ice cream and then making fried food for lunch and dinner! She'd even fry the pasta if she could! For forty-eight years I've been eating that crap, and they still break my balls about ice cream. Just one, that's all I had.”

It didn't happen often, but in this case Grandpa Ampelio was absolutely right. Grandma Tilde had always cooked everything on the basis of a single, immovable parameter: it hasn't been fried enough yet.